Posts Tagged ‘Berlin’

Yad Vashem recently recognized Dr. Mohamed Helmy and Frieda Szturmann as Righteous Among the Nations, an honorary title bestowed by Yad Vashem on behalf of the State of Israel and the Jewish people to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Dr. Helmy, an Egyptian physician living in Berlin and Szturmann, a local German woman, worked together in the heart of Nazi Germany to help save a Jewish family during the height of the Holocaust.

Dr. Helmy is the first Egyptian to be recognized as Righteous Among the Nations. Yad Vashem is currently searching for the rescuers’ next of kin to posthumously honor their relatives in a ceremony and present them with the certificate and medal of the Righteous.

Dr. Mohamed Helmy was born in Khartoum in 1901 to Egyptian parents. In 1922, Helmy went to Germany to study medicine and settled in Berlin., where, he went to work at the Robert Koch Institute.

According to Nazi racial theory, Dr. Helmy was not being of the Aryan race and was discriminated against.

Despite being targeted by the regime, Helmy spoke out against Nazi policies, and notwithstanding the great danger, risked his life by helping his Jewish friends.

A Jerusalem resident who belongs to the ultra-Haredi Neturei Karta sect is being charged with contacting the Iranian embassy in Berlin, offering to spy for Iran in Israel, and even proposing to murder a Zionist for Iran.

The man is being charged with contact with a foreign agent and an intent to commit treason.

According to the charges, which were made public today, the man decided three years ago to start spying for Iran. He went online—not a small feat for a Neturei Karta man—and checked out Iranian embassies in Europe. In January, 2011, he flew to Berlin, showed up at the Iranian embassy and told the reception clerk that he was an Israeli citizen interested in meeting an Iranian official.

He was taken to an office in the embassy where, according to the charges, he met with three unknown individuals. He told the Iranians who he was, explaining that his faith rejects the existence of the state of Israel, and that he wished to replace the current Israeli government with a gentile government. He then proposed to pas intelligence information to the Iranians.

During the meeting, the man asked his hosts how come they don’t manage to guard their people in Iran against Israeli assassinations. In response, the Iranians asked how he can be so insolent when he’s asking for political asylum, and he responded that he wasn’t interested in an asylum, and that he would gladly murder a Zionist for them.

According to the charges, the Iranians told the accused they were going to check the matter with their superiors and gave the accused man a note with an email where they would send him messages. They also instructed him to call them at the embassy.

The accused returned to Israel and started checking the email account in Internet cafes around Jerusalem. He also made several payphone calls to Iran’s Berlin embassy, asking to speak to “Haji Baba,” the nickname of one of the Iranian with whom he had contact in Germany.

The arrest of double-oy-vey-seven took place two weeks ago, under a massive gag order. He was remanded to a holding cell in the Petach Tikva magistrate court and his appeal of the arrest was rejected by the district court. According to the prosecution, the accused has already admitted the charges against him.

They spent about a half-hour walking through the sea of 2,711 slabs that comprise the memorial, according to Uwe Neumaerker, its director. They were guarded by helicopters hovering over the area, which was cleared of visitors, so the memorial “was totally silent and they were alone,” Neumaerker told JTA by phone following the visit.

“They were impressed that we Germans have such a memorial in the center of our city,” Neumaerker said, adding that the first lady “really has an aura.”

American-Jewish architect Peter Eisenman designed the memorial, which was opened to the public in May 2005 on the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Also on the visit was Auma Obama, President Obama’s half-sister, about whose existence he reportedly learned of only after his father’s death in 1982. Auma Obama, 53, studied in Germany and lives in her native Kenya.

The Chief Rabbinate of Israel has sent a letter of support to Berlin Chabad Rabbi Yehudah Teichtal, who was charged by an anti-circumcision activist for practicing the ritual of oral suction of a small amount of blood at a circumcision.

The practice is widely accepted in Israel but caused controversy in the New York area after several reports of herpes. At least two boys died and two others suffered brain damage in the 11 cases of herpes reported by New York City health officials after the practice was carried out at circumsions in the years 2004-2011.

Last September, the board of health voted 9-0 to require mohels to obtain signed consent forms from parents before performing the rite.

Rabbi Moshe Morsiano, director of the division for circumcisions in the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, emphasized in his letter that that the ritual of oral suction should not be carried out when the mohel is ill or has a sore in his mouth.

Rabbi Morsiano listed a number of opinions written by rabbis of the past several generations, all whom concluded that the ritual, known in Hebrew as Metzitza B’Pe, is integral part of ritual circumcision.

The Rabbinical Center of Europe, which represents m ore than 700 rabbis, also has supported Rabbi Teichtal.

The controversy in Germany is particularly important because of last year’s ruling by a judge in a German province that circumcision is illegal. German Chancellor Angela Merkel stepped in and backed legislation to make sure that religious circumcision remained legal.

“The Jews of Europe must have religious freedom,
said the Rabbinical Center. “All Jewish leaders have the responsibility and obligation to stop any interference with any detail of Jewish practice”.

This year marks the seventieth anniversary of a remarkable public protest by ordinary German women against the Nazi regime.

From February 27 to March 6, 1943, a group of unorganized German women went into the streets of downtown Berlin, within a few city blocks of the most feared centers of Nazi power, to protest for the release of their Jewish husbands, who had just been arrested by the Gestapo. Daily giving voice to their collective demand – “give us our husbands back” – first softly, then with increasing urgency, they succeeded in achieving their goal.

For these German women, the brutal Nazi state had lost all legitimacy. Like very few others, they were willing to express this publicly, on the streets, for all to see. For decades, their story was largely absent from histories of Nazi Germany. Their story challenges the comforting, generally accepted narrative that opposition was honorable but always futile. This year’s anniversary is an opportunity to focus deserved attention on these women’s brave action – and its implications for resistance more broadly.

On February 27, 1943, as part of the Nazi plan to remove the last remaining Jews from German soil, the Gestapo arrested some 2,000 Berlin Jews who had not yet been deported because they were married to non-Jews. In response, hundreds of women – wives of those arrested – pushed their way onto the street in front of Rosenstrasse 2-4, an office of the Jewish community where these arrested Jews were being held, and began to protest.

SS men as well as policemen guarded the single entrance. Over the course of the following week the Gestapo repeatedly threatened to shoot the protesters in the street, causing them to scatter briefly before resuming their collective cry of “give us our husbands back.”

Decades later, I interviewed one of these women, Elsa Holzer, who remembered arriving on the street in search of her husband. “I thought,” she said, “I would be alone there the first time I went to the Rosenstrasse…. I didn’t necessarily think it would do any good, but I had to go see what was going on…. If you had to calculate whether you would do any good by protesting, you wouldn’t have gone. But we wanted to show that we weren’t willing to let them [our husbands] go. I went to Rosenstrasse every day, before work. And there was always a flood of people there. It wasn’t organized, or instigated. Everyone was simply there. Exactly like me. That’s what is so wonderful about it.”

During the same week of this protest, some 7,000 of the last Jews in Berlin were sent to Auschwitz. On Rosenstrasse, however, the regime hesitated; almost all of those held there were released on March 6. Even intermarried Jews who had also been sent to Auschwitz and put in work camps were returned to Germany.

Surprising as it might seem, these events on closer examination fit with the treacherous strategies of the Nazi regime for domestic control. The Rosenstrasse protest occurred as many Germans were tempted to doubt Hitler’s leadership following Germany’s debacle in the Battle of Stalingrad. As he elaborated in Mein Kampf, Hitler believed that popular support comprised the primary pillar of his authority among the German “racial” people, and his dictatorship throughout strove to maintain this basis of his power. To end this protest, the regime released the intermarried Jews, furthering, for that moment, Hitler’s goal of quelling any appearance of dissention.

The murderous Nazi regime also appeased other public protests. On October 11, 1943, on Adolf Hitler Square in the city of Witten, some three hundred women protested against the official decision to withhold their food ration cards until they evacuated their homes as part of Nazi policy to protect civilians from bombing raids. The following day Germans in Lünen, Hamm and Bochum also protested on the streets for the same reason.

In response, Hitler ordered all regional authorities not to withhold ration cards as a method of forcing civilians to evacuate their homes. This was followed by further orders by Nazi officials to refrain from “coercive measures” against evacuees who had returned. In his cold calculations, Hitler chose not to draw further attention to public protest, judging it the best way to protect his authority – and the appearance, promoted by his propaganda machine, that all Germans stood united behind him.

On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry bragged about freedom of speech, religion and thought in the United States in front of an audience of German students, telling them that in America “you have a right to be stupid if you want to be.”

Forgetting, perhaps, that he was in Berlin, former home to the most terrifying regime under Heaven, Kerry bragged, according to Reuters:

“As a country, as a society, we live and breathe the idea of religious freedom and religious tolerance, whatever the religion, and political freedom and political tolerance, whatever the point of view.”

Then Kerry really turned it on, telling his audience how in the land of the free neo Nazis are permitted to strut in their jackboots and swastika wherever they feel like, even in the Jewish suburbs of Chicago. This is how Mr. sensitivity phrased it:

“People have sometimes wondered about why our Supreme Court allows one group or another to march in a parade even though it’s the most provocative thing in the world and they carry signs that are an insult to one group or another.”

Heart warming.

Except that, in Germany, the law restricts neo-Nazi propaganda and Nazi symbols are banned, with the exception of artistic or historic reenactment purposes. In 2005, Germany’s parliament tightened the restrictions on neo-Nazi marches to keep them away from sensitive memorials such as former concentration camps. The changes make it easier for local authorities to ban such gatherings.

Oblivious to all that, Kerry boasted: “The reason is, that’s freedom, freedom of speech. In America you have a right to be stupid – if you want to be… And we tolerate it. We somehow make it through that.”

Actually, not all of us – certainly those unlucky Jews who used to live in Berlin while all that stupidity was going on, starting in 1933.

“Now, I think that’s a virtue,” Kerry declared proudly. “I think that’s something worth fighting for. The important thing is to have the tolerance to say, you know, you can have a different point of view.”

So now what, revoke all those intolerant laws against neo Nazi marches through Berlin? Because that certainly sounded like the natural conclusion from the uber-tolerant Kerry.

Kerry made the comments in favor of letting Nazis be Nazis on his first foreign trip since becoming secretary of state on Feb 1. After one-night stops in London and Berlin, he is visiting Paris, Rome, Ankara, Cairo, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Doha before returning to Washington on March 6.